


The Lake (Waiting)

by Fallingtowardsoblivion



Series: Amelia's Merlin Bash [1]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bookstore, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Amelia's Merlin Bash, Drabble, Gen, Immortal Merlin, Merlin waits, No Plot/Plotless, One Shot, POV Merlin, Prompt Fic, Random & Short, the lake - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-04
Packaged: 2018-05-31 04:02:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6454903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallingtowardsoblivion/pseuds/Fallingtowardsoblivion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: she found me in the bookstore</p><p>Merlin has waited for a thousand years, until finally everyone returned. Well, almost everyone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lake (Waiting)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm doing a thing on LJ, a personal challenge, where I write small drabbley things every week, with a random prompt. I hope you enjoyed this first one! (note: unbeta'd!)

Prompt 1: she found me in the bookstore

***

It had taken one thousand years – one thousand years of searching and waiting and wondering – before they had finally come back. Merlin had moved with the times – reluctant, eternally nostalgic. He had waited by the Lake, first camped out, then building a small cabin, then later a cottage, then a house.

 When the house was evicted, and the lake and boggy areas nearby drained for fields, Merlin still stayed.

When the fields turned to dust and the farmers all left, the shiny incentive of a new world and money and power and glory dangled before their faces, Merlin still waited. He always had, and he always would. True, for a while there he had traveled – had only seldom come to his cabin in the woods, too overwhelmed by the stagnant familiarity of his past loss.

 But then one night, in the crumbling markets of Constantinople, a hand had grabbed him, reaching out from the thick, rough cloak of a beggar woman. She had looked in his eyes, the power of his visions seeping through their mere touch, and murmured lines foretelling a return, a King, and a Lake vacant, missing its guardian.

Missing Merlin.

She had then pulled away, abrupt, harsh, and bid her farewell with the hissed words, ‘you leave your lady waiting – even now the lake calls to you’.

Merlin had not responded, frozen from the meeting, eyes trailing after the woman’s receding form.

She had not been familiar, that woman. Merely a hag blessed and cursed with the gift of Sight. Yet she had _known_.

She had known that Merlin was running and hiding, had known that Merlin knew that scouring the globe would do naught to bring his King back sooner –

Had known that Merlin’s job always had and always would be to stand at the side of his King, even if that meant standing at the side of a Lake.

So Merlin had gone back, had built his home, had waited and watched and stood complacently in the peripheral. He let it become a field, knowing at the back of his mind that Freya would allow it to be such. Knowing that Arthur was going to be reborn – not thrust from the Lake itself.

Merlin plowed the earth himself for a while, until the offer to buy his farm to build a small town was posed.

Merlin let it happen – sold the land, and grew tight with anticipation. The time was drawing near.

And it did. In 1967, Merlin awoke one night, panting and sweating and chilled to the bone, with the assured knowledge that _it was time._

Lancelot – the first to die, was a mere toddler when Merlin found him. The warlock had watched him and his nanny from afar, keeping distance, running his small, cramped bookstore, waiting for the time when he could reveal himself, and when the knight would remember.

1970 was the next time Merlin _knew_. Gwaine had returned.

From then on, periodically his fallen friends returned – Leon and Guinevere, both having found happy if not hollow endings in old age, the last to return.

Merlin waited, keeping an eye on the reincarnations, Arthur especially.

As time passed, though, the warlock began to grow concerned. Almost everyone – even the old man who smoked too many cigars and had a golden glint in his eyes – had come back.

Everyone, that was, except Freya.

Merlin sometimes wondered if her return was different – or maybe nonexistent. She hadn’t died as the others had, she hadn’t gone on to beyond the veil, but rather in between it. She had watched the waters as Merlin had, and had watched Arthur in turn.

***

Merlin frowned, browsing through the old, dusty stacks in a hidden corner of the bookstore. He had been running the place under various identities over the past fifty years.

“Excuse me?”

Merlin yelped, jumping as he whirled around, startled. No matter his age, the warlock was never really able to shake the jumpiness that had overcome him after Arthur’s death. It had settled into his bones, just as eternal as Merlin.

“Ah – sorry,” Merlin said, his eyes finally looking at the person who’d scared him.

“Do you happen to know where the book ‘The Legends of King Arthur’ is?” The woman said, her smile soft and open and nothing like Merlin remembered.

The warlock gaped, giving it a moment before he came back to his sense. Then he did, and the woman must’ve realized it to, because her smile turned into a grin, as did his, and before he knew what was happening the warlock was falling into her arms, giving her a tearful hug.

“You don’t know how good it is to see you.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! ;A;


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